Frozen food again?
National TV dinner day just happened on September 10th, but do you know the history and origin of TV dinners? In 1925, the Brooklyn-born entrepreneur Clarence Birdseye invented a machine for freezing packaged fish that would revolutionize the storage and preparation of food. Maxson Food Systems of Long Island used Birdseye’s technology, the double-belt freezer, to sell the first complete frozen dinners to airlines in 1945, but plans to offer those meals in supermarkets were canceled after the death of the company’s founder. Maxson was a New York inventor that got the idea to package an entire frozen meal after planting too much cauliflower on his property. He cooked, seasoned and froze his cauliflower before forgetting about it for about a year. He then pulled it out, ate it and realized his cauliflower was as good as they day he prepared it. He came up with the idea of a good looking, frozen meal that tasted great but was pretty simple, with one portion of meat and vegetables, set and separated on a round tray with a lid. He took his invention to the Navy and the officials loved the idea of the light compact meals that cost pennies to make. Instead of canned mystery meat, compressed cereal, biscuits and cigarettes, they were getting food that looked, smelled and tasted surprisingly delicious.
The Swanson Company claims they developed the idea for a prepacked frozen meal after having 520,000 additional pounds of turkey that didn’t sell the year before. Allegedly, all of this meat was loaded to frozen train cars to buy time while Swanson was trying to figure out how to save it all. Gerry Thomas, also of Swanson, was also said to have invented them. Thomas had the idea to add other holiday staples such as cornbread stuffing and sweet potatoes, and to serve them alongside the bird in frozen, partitioned aluminum trays designed to be heated in the oven. Betty Cronin, Swanson’s bacteriologist, helped the meals succeed with her research into how to heat the meat and vegetables at the same time while killing food-borne germs. TV dinners had found another niche audience in dieters, who were glad for the built-in portion control. The next big breakthrough came in 1986, with the Campbell Soup Company’s invention of microwave-safe trays, which cut meal preparation to mere minutes. Yet the ultimate convenience food was now too convenient for some diners, as one columnist lamented: “Progress is wonderful, but I will still miss those steaming, crinkly aluminum TV trays.”
Thompson says he got the idea on a business trip flight and there was a hot meal on a transactional tray. So if we circle back, he was on a Pan American flight when he was served the Maxson meal which was already available for 7 years. Thompson came back and pitched the idea “he invented.”
TV Dinner Chatter
I found the secret place my wife was hiding her stash of Snickers bars.
They were inside a bag of frozen broccoli.
Why is frozen yogurt better than ice cream?
Ice cream ain’t got no culture.
If it weren’t for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we’d still be eating frozen radio dinners.
Searching through a freezer full of turkeys for Thanksgiving the lady could not find one large enough. She called over to the clerk and pointing to the turkeys asked “Do they get any bigger?” He looked at her and replied, “No lady, They are dead.”
September 26th Birthdays
1948 – Olivia Newton John, 1981 – Serena Williams 1989 – Hanna Mae Lee, 1969 – Naomi Watts
1771 – Johnny Appleseed, 1968 – Jim Caviezel, 1980 – Channing Tatum, 1564 – William Shakespeare